Follow the Free Wind

by Leigh Brackett

  “Just one minute,” Ashley said. “That’s fine big talk, but where do you expect to go?”

  “Back to the Forks,” Jim said, “as soon as the weather clears.”

  “You’ll walk it.”

  Jim shrugged. “I’ll walk it.”

  There was another small rumbling around the circle and this time it was not laughter. The circle had grown. Rich sighed and stood up.

  “I reckon I got to go with Beckwourth, General.”

  “Well,” said Ashley, surprised and upset. “I didn’t know you loved him that much.”

  “I don’t,” Rich said. “Fact is, I don’t even like him much.”

  “Then why?” Ashley was genuinely amazed.

  Rich said, “Because he’s right.”

  Mose Harris stood up, shaking the snow in a great cloud off his buffalo robe. He stood beside Rich.

  The General looked at him. “You too, Harris?”

  Mose nodded. “Fair’s fair, General, and there ain’t a man here don’t know it.”

  There was a mutter of assent from the circle, and a voice spoke out of the group, saying, “It ain’t right not to give him a horse. Might as well shoot a man as not give him a horse.”

  “Do we get horses?” Rich asked. “Or do we walk?”

  “What the hell,” said another voice suddenly above the screaming wind, “let’s all walk. That Pawnee town was mighty warm and dry. I don’t know why I’m settin’ here hungry in a blizzard when I could be lyin’ by a fire eatin’ fat cow.”

  The response to this was so great that for the first time Ashley became truly alarmed. He looked around at the men. Only the faces of those nearest him were recognizable, the others blurred by the snow that was falling ever thicker. Fitz remained squatting, his scarlet blanket over his head. He watched the General.

  Ashley spoke quietly, but his voice carried above the wind, or perhaps beneath it, because every man heard.

  “Anyone who wishes to turn back will be given a horse and provisions. As for myself, I shall go on, even if I must do so alone.”

  He meant it, and they knew he meant it. He looked at them for a moment longer and then returned to his shelter, managing somehow to do even that with dignity. There was no more talking, and the circle broke up. The snow poured down heavier and it was getting dark. Jim walked away. Rich said behind him, “Our mess is over here. I think.”

  They dug in the snow like dogs. The greenhorn kid was already buried, with just a blowhole open. Mose Harris appeared and began to dig beside them.

  Rich asked, “Where’s Fitz?”

  “Stopped behind to talk to the General,” Mose said. Rich grunted. He and Jim spread the buffalo robes and crawled into them. In cold camps like this the men customarily slept in pairs for warmth. Mose bedded himself down and cursed Fitz for keeping him waiting. Jim lay quiet. He felt strangely peaceful, much as he had when he made up his mind not to obey Carson’s curfew.

  “Rich,” he said. “Mose.”

  “What?”

  “I’m obliged to you. But you don’t have to go with me.”

  “That’s the bad of it,” Rich said bitterly. “We do. We got right up in meetin’ and said we’d do it and now we got to do it.”

  “Fire and fat cow,” Mose said thoughtfully. “Don’t sound half bad.”

  Rich made a derisive sound. “Fire and fat cow! Think of the beaver streams, with nary a trap ever laid into ’em. Think of the beaver plews, bale on bale of ’em. Think of the money. Fire and fat cow! Hell’s full of fire and fat cow.” He rolled over with his back to Jim, trying automatically to take the top covering with him as he rolled. “Trouble, Jim. That’s what you are. Trouble.”

  Jim said, “But you said I was right.” He locked his fingers on the robe and hung on. Rich gave up and stopped pulling.

  “You are,” he said. “It’s still trouble.”

  “Meaning none of the rest of you ever had it,” Jim said, “and if I wasn’t here you wouldn’t have it now. That’s almost enough to make me change my mind about going.”

  “What is?” asked Fitz’s voice out of the thick dark. Jim heard him scramble in beside Mose, amid bitter complaints that he was bringing the blizzard into bed with him.

  “Forget it,” Jim said curtly.

  “I was hoping you would change your mind,” Fitz said. He was an Irishman born and he could be charming as a spring day when he wanted to. He was being charming now. Jim smiled.

  “Why?”

  “If you go, Richards and Harris go with you—and you heard the men. As many as half of them, maybe more, might go too. You know how everybody felt about this move anyway, and now hitting weather like this—”

  “Fire and fat cow,” said Mose dreamily.

  “That’s right. Weakens me when I think about it,” Fitz said. “But think about it the other way. Think what’s waiting for us. Jim, you haven’t seen that country, but I have. Great mountains, fat valleys, and enough beaver in those streams to make us all rich. It’d be a pity to throw it all away now.”

  “If I’m all that important,” Jim said with quiet wickedness, “why wasn’t the General a little more polite?”

  Rich groaned. “You’ve given him a sense of power, Fitz. Now the devil only knows what he’ll do.”

  Some of the charm had gone out of Fitz’s voice when he answered. “It’s the fire and fat cow that’s pulling the men, not Jim, or you either. It’s just the idea of anybody turning back. It could split the party.”

  Jim chuckled. “That makes me feel real good.”

  “Listen, Jim,” Fitz said. “The Old Man was wrong. You won your point. He won’t ride you again. Now why can’t you—”

  “He’ll have to do better than that,” Jim said.

  “What?”

  “Watch his goddam tongue. If he calls me that name again I’ll kill him.”

  “Then you will stay.”

  “I didn’t say so, did I? I was all fixed to go, I can’t change my mind without thinking about it. I’ll let you know.”

  He could hear Fitz clap his jaws shut on something he was just about to say. Rich groaned again.

  “Jim—”

  “What?”

  “Nothin’. Nothin’ at all.”

  Jim smiled. He settled his hat so that the brim stopped the snow from trickling down his neck and drifted sweetly off to sleep.

  The blizzard blew itself out during the night of the twenty-seventh. The morning of the twenty-eighth was clear and windless. The men emerged from their holes into an arctic cold that seemed almost warm because the air was still. Four of the horses had died, including Jim’s old pack-horse. The snow was very deep.

  “Don’t look to me,” Rich grumbled, up to his chest in a drift, “like nobody’s going no place.”

  But the General was brisk and cheerful. In the predawn dark the men dug out the packs and got the horses loaded, and the General went first on his tall bay to start breaking open the trail through the sand hills and down to the river. The winter sun came up and turned the world to a glitter of purest white, very beautiful under the clean blue sky, and very painful to the eyes. They fought and floundered in relays, sometimes riding, sometimes walking where the drifts were too deep for horses, trampling, digging with their hands to make a path.

  “We won’t get far this way,” Rich said. His breath steamed. He threw snow around like an angry terrier. “Either forward or back. Made up your mind yet?”

  “No,” said Jim.

  “You’re a liar. It was made up long ago. You wouldn’t tell Fitz just so’s he’d sweat a while and make the General sweat too.”

  “When was it made up?” Jim demanded.

  “Soon’s the General humbled down and asked you.”

  “When was that?”

  “When he sent Fitz. Don’t play simple with me, Jim. I know you.”

  Jim blew two plumes of steam out of his nostrils like a horse, and did not answer. He threw snow aside in showers, feeling the blood run warm in him
. It was good after the long cramped wait to move again. All of a sudden he broke through a wall of drift and the river valley lay ahead. Something moved in the blinding dazzle. He cupped his hands over his eyes and then he shouted.

  “Buffalo!”

  The herds were still moving, the great powerful shaggy bands treading pathways in the snow where the weak might follow, baring the grass so the weak might feed behind them.

  Jim mounted and rode his horse plunging to the buffalo trail. The others came after, shouting as they went.

  They stood together in the broad path and the horses tore hungrily at the cold grass.

  The General looked at the men. “There was talk,” he said, “that some of you wanted to turn back.” His gaze centered on Rich and Mose.

  They looked at Jim. Jim looked at the General. He seemed to be waiting for something.

  Reluctantly, coldly, the General turned to Jim. He said one word, not as though he liked saying it but as though a soldier must do many things he does not like and do them efficiently.

  He said, “Beckwourth?”

  Jim smiled, settling himself in the saddle. “I guess I just got to see the Rockies, General,” he said. “That’s what I came for.”

  Ashley looked away from him, at the other men. “Anyone else?”

  There was some harrumphing and shuffling, but Rich said loudly, “This child’s for beaver!” Mose echoed him. It seemed that since the ringleaders weren’t going, nobody else quite wanted to take the limelight. The General nodded and reined his horse around sharply, making him prance. Some of the men lifted a shrill wild yell and the whole cavalcade started off, heading west in the wake of the buffalo.

  On the twentieth of January they reached a small island in the South Platte. It was grown to sweet cottonwoods, the second life-saving oasis of fuel and fodder since they left the Forks. At the western edge of the island Fitzpatrick lifted his arm and pointed to a line of distant peaks that rose white and shimmering into the clear sky.

  Jim Beckwourth got his first look at the Rocky Mountains.

  EIGHT

  The second look was closer, and the mountains were twice as grand. But instead of being unreal and mysterious like the mountains in a dream they resolved themselves into a solid wall of rock and ice, cruel, threatening, and deadly.

  They camped at the foot of the Front Range for most of the month of February. It was a good camp. There was shelter from the wind, plenty of fuel, plenty of sweet bark, and even grass for the horses. The men would have been willing to stay there until spring, but each day the General went out with Fitz or Mose Harris or Jim Clyman to hunt for a way over the barrier range. Each night he came back exhausted and half frozen, looking grimmer and more obstinate every time.

  Rich watched the General one particular evening as he stomped by in the dusk. Ashley had had Fitz with him today. Rich and Jim and Mose were sitting by the fire while the greenhorn broiled the elk steaks they had shot that day.

  “I don’t like the look of him,” Rich said. “I don’t like the look of him at all.”

  “Reckon,” said Mose, “he’s about to do it again.” They all turned as Fitz came up to the fire and hunched over it, shivering. “How about it, Fitz? Is he?”

  “Is he what?” Fitz grabbed one of the half-raw steaks and began to wolf it down. “Wagh! Hungry work.”

  “Fixing to go over the mountains,” Rich said, “whether or no. I been with the General a long time and I know the signs. Whenever his jaw sticks out like that he’s about to do an evil of some kind.”

  Jim looked away from the fire. They were on the shadow side of the mountains and the shadow was a clear pure blue, very pale on the snow fields, shading deeper and deeper into the folds and clefts. The high peaks caught the sun and blazed, so that the top of the range seemed to be splashed with hot gold.

  “Ask the General,” Fitz said. “I don’t know what’s in his mind.”

  “Modesty don’t become you, Fitz,” Rich said. “You’re the proud kind, high-headed and haughty. You’re the General’s right hand, leastwise when Diah Smith ain’t around, and if you don’t know you ought to. Is he going over the mountains?”

  “He’s going,” Jim said, although nobody had asked him.

  “How do you know?” Fitz asked.

  “Same reason he left Atkinson. Same reason he left the Forks. He’s got to.”

  The hot gold darkened to red and the peaks were like spearheads after a battle.

  Rich sighed. “Have you found a pass, Fitz? Or do we have to chop one out with our hands?”

  Fitz said, “Beckwourth knows everything. Ask him.”

  “I don’t have to be extra smart to see from here that the passes are full of snow. He’ll go just the same, you watch. And pretty quick.”

  Jim turned again to the fire. He ate, and slept, and in his dreams he was no bigger than a little fly climbing, climbing, up a dark wall that ended in the stars. The air was black and windy and it was terribly cold. In his dream he knew that he could never reach the top.

  Two days later, on the twenty-sixth, Ashley led his men out of camp and up the knees of the mountains.

  And it was not too different from Jim’s dream, except that the toiling was done by daylight and the air was bright. The shine of the snow fields pierced the eyes like javelins. But the cold was as he had dreamed it. In the summer he thought these mountains would have been fairly easy to cross, for the pass was not awfully high nor awfully steep. But now it was choked with the packed snows of a long winter, and the approaches to it were treacherous with wind-polished ice and crusted stretches that appeared solid and then broke beneath the foot, crumbling into gullies that could swallow up a man or a horse. They crawled. In places they took the packs off the horses and carried them on their own backs and then went back to guide and support the animals one by one. Darkness caught them and they huddled in their robes to shiver out the night, and then crept on again in the rainbow dawn, so heartbreakingly, bone-freezingly beautiful. It took them three days to cross, and every minute of that time while they all danced precariously on the thin edge of death the General was there, leading them step by step, a man unafraid of mountains or cold or the devil himself. Jim shook his head. You had to admire the man. Like him or not, you had to. At times like this you were proud to be one of his men. At times like this you would follow him to hell, even though he would not speak to you along the way.

  They came down out of the pass not knowing what they would find. They were far south of the country Fitz and Clyman had been through last summer and no white man had ever crossed the Front Range here before. But the General’s luck was in.

  Between the mighty ranges that marched behind and before, the ground was easy, the south slopes bare of snow, and game was thick. They moved west and north. Somewhere in this direction, beyond the Divide, was the valley of a river the Indians called the Siskadee and the Spanish called the Green, and it was along this river and its tributaries that the General expected to find his men. They kept on this course until their way was blocked by a range that refused to be bulled out by the General, though he killed some horses and wore out his men trying to get through the passes. Now they went north along the base of these mountains, and again the General’s luck was in.

  The country rolled magnificently in ridge and valley, splendid to look at and rich in game. The men could gorge themselves on buffalo and antelope and mountain sheep. And most beautiful of all to the eyes of the trappers were the very many little streams that came down cold and pure from the snow fields, their banks fringed with willows.

  “Beaver,” Rich said, and grinned a greedy grin. “Break out the traps, Jim. You got a lot of leamin’ to do before I turn you loose.”

  The General moved slowly while the men worked, and Jim began to learn what it was like to be up to beaver.

  He waded in icy water, working always upstream, moving on numbed insensible feet that had still to feel for holes and snags and hold steady in slick mud. Rich taught him
to look for the runs and slides and how to find the most carefully hidden lodges. He taught him how deep to set the trap and how to anchor it to the long float-pole, and when to use a float-stick attached to the trap so that it could be found in deep water without having to dive for it. He taught him the use of the “medicine” stick, the bait-stick set above the trap to draw the beaver by the strong musky scent of a substance Rich carried in a little horn bottle. But he would not tell Jim the secret of the concoction, except that it was based on the musk glands of the beaver. Jim found out that every trapper had his own recipe for “medicine” and that none of them would tell what it was, not to their wives, their children, or their dearest friends. He thought they were being a little childish about this, but pretty soon he was carrying his own little antelope-horn bottle and being as mysterious as the next about what was in it. And after he had, from sheer ignorance, fouled up two or three sets of traps, he learned to keep his own scent off the trap, out of the “medicine,” and off the banks of the stream.

  “Beaver ain’t like other four-footed critters,” Rich told him. “The Indians think they’re medicine people, pretty much like us except they live in the water, and I wouldn’t want to say they’re wrong. Look at the lodges they build, as good as the Pawnee, and look at the way they live in ’em, not all helter-skelter like, the way most animals do, but all ordered and nice with the Old Man beaver having the say and the young ones saluting him polite-like with their paws and listening to what he tells them. Their tribe law says everybody’s got to do his share. If there’s a lazy young beaver that won’t work, why they throw him out of the village. And look how they build their dams. I’ve seen milldams at home weren’t half so good.”

  So had Jim. It didn’t really seem possible that a mere animal could plan and build such a construction and then keep it in perfect repair. If the sharp hoofs of a passing deer disturbed the dam you would see the fresh clay brought up from the bottom and plastered on, patted and smoothed by busy little paws. But this was not the most of the marvel. The way they arranged their spillways and canals to keep the water level just where they wanted it regardless of flood or dry season was something Jim figured no animal could do unless it had some pretty special powers.